Smoke and mercy

In his first novel since his expansive West Country trilogy (2017–19), set during the early part of the last century, Tim Pears has switched to something short and fabular, moving back in time to AD72. With Roman invaders subjugating tribes in the west, Run to the Western Shore opens as a young slave, Quintus, observes the arrival of a band of Britons (“a discordant cacophony … a raucous rabble” – juxtapositions of similar words and phrases are not uncommon in this novel) at the Roman fort where he serves the governor of Britannia, Sextus Julius Frontinus. After a face-off between Frontinus and Cunicatus – chief of the Dilovi tribe – the Britons depart, leaving behind Cunicatus’s daughter Olwen.

That night, before Olwen has to endure her first date with Frontinus, she seeks out Quintus and the pair set out on a westwards escape, apparently hoping to return to Olwen’s people. Along the way they meet shepherds who share their mutton, a band performing a ritual sacrifice of an elderly man, Roman soldiers whom Olwen dispatches, four young hoodlums who threaten to rape Olwen until clever Quintus talks them out of it, a druid who imparts his wisdom about souls and spirits, and a couple of beaver-hunters – who cure Olwen’s sprained ankle with beaver grease, feed the couple beaver meat and give them a bed consisting of beaver hide quilts.

Pears’s fiction, from his debut, In the Place of Fallen Leaves (1993), has been noted for its evocation of the natural world, and the protagonists’ journey through western England and Wales in this novel enables him to play to his strengths. The fields are thick with cow parsley, buttercups, campion, honeysuckle and willow herb; birds of prey – hen harriers, sparrowhawks, kestrels – hover and swoop; oak trees host myriad insects. What is somewhat disconcerting, but one assumes to be a deliberate effect, is that the reader’s sense of the passage of time in the story and the descriptions of natural phenomena go out of sync. The novel opens in late summer. After what appear to be a few days Olwen and Quintus are trudging through autumn leaf fall. Then comes snow, then, not too long after that, hawthorn blossom. The pair become lovers; a few days later, it seems, she tells him she is pregnant.

There are further anomalies. Olwen tells Quintus that she is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Taliesin, “the first of the famous bards of my country”. This cannot be the Taliesin usually recognized as the first Welsh bard: he lived five centuries later. She prays to the spirit of an oak tree, but later exclaims, again several centuries in advance of recognized history, “Sweet mother of mercy”. Even further in advance of their time, Quintus observes “smoke rising here and there in perfect threads, as if gravity had turned upside down”. He describes making a snorkel; Olwen, who has never seen the sea, doesn’t ask him what a snorkel is. One concludes that this is a novel about time, memory, history and legend; that Pears’s subject is what conventional chronicles cannot record.

For the most part he tells his story straight, though occasionally he indulges in little faux-archaic touches: “thus did they”, “white was her skin”, “disappeared in the direction whence he had first come” (one might, perhaps, allow “whence”, but “first” is unnecessary), “ovine mimicry” (the people were bleating), “ursine head” (to avoid a repetition of “bear’s head” in the previous sentence), “saliva manifested itself in Quintus’ mouth”. Then there are those repetitions (birds “moulting, losing their feathers”), along with confusing metaphors (a hen harrier is described as sailing away upriver) and awkward echoes (“rain … fell with trenchant force, drenching them in seconds”).

Amid so much evocative writing, these may be minor concerns. But they suggest that Tim Pears is not quite in control of his material, and they lead one to hope that he will return to the present, or the more recent past, in his next outing.

Nicholas Clee’s latest book is Courses for Horses: A journey round racing in Britain and Ireland, 2023

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